HN Explorer

Show HN: Open Source Bot That Summarizes Top Hacker News Stories Using GPT-3 (github.com)

71 points by wskish ↗ HN
HN Summary is an open source bot which sumarizes top stories on Hacker News and publishes the summaries to a Telegram channel.

Whenever a new story appears on the Hacker News API /topstories.json endpoint, this bot summarizes it (currently using OpenAI GPT-3 text-davinci-002) and sends the story title, summary, and url to the hn_summary channel on Telegram.

The purpose of this project is to help build intuition on the capabilities of the current generation of large language models while making a broader swath of top Hacker News content more easily accessible. It could also serve as a platform for experimentation with other language model capabilites such as semantic search.

Join the HN Summary channel on Telegram to see the bot in action and enjoy the story summaries.

https://t.me/hn_summary

There are a number of potential directions I am interested in exploring here, such as making the bot interactive to allow features like bookmarking urls, semantic search, and semantic filtering.

I am also thinking about interfaces other than telegram. I started with telegram since I had recently used it on another project and it seemed like the easiest way to start playing with it. What other interfaces would make sense here?

35 comments

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amy-why
The summary is great! Now I don't have to see all those ads when I click into the story!
wskish
FYI, here is the current prompt prefix we prepend to the story text before sending to GPT-3. Any suggested alternatives? Will try them based on points here.

"Provide a detailed summary of the following web page, including what type of content it is (e.g. news article, essay, technical report, blog post, product documentation, content marketing, etc). If there is anything controversial please highlight the controversy. If there is something unique or clever, please highlight that as well:"

lerela
I'm curious: is the "please" you added purely a communication habit or does it lead the model to provide better results?
wskish
It is perhaps unnecessary, and I don't have any data that would support that it makes things better, but I am basically guessing that in the training set of {mostly the entire internet} the responses to questions that include "please" might be ever so slightly higher quality! Perhaps it is just a superstition...
amy-why
Browsing through the summaries, GPT-3 seems pretty good at capturing “controversial” aspect of the stories, which is quite impressive.
wskish
yeah news articles really tend to highlight the "controversial" aspect. Unfortunately they are also the hardest ones to scrape...
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cheschire
If only n-gate were still publishing their own weekly HN summaries still. The humor was a much needed filter to keep me from getting too serious about things.
er1t0
Doesn't text-davinci-002 have a text input limit , what happens to stories that exceed that limit ?
wskish
We use the GPT2 tokenizer (which is apparently the same as the GPT3 tokenizer) to count the number of tokens in the extracted input text and brutally truncate the input text to keep it under the limit. There is a lot of room for more finesse in this area if anyone wants to help out. See open issues in github.
diimdeep
I would like to see HN discussion summaries, of what HN comments section brain talk about.
wskish
Definitely, it would be great to figure out how to summarize the discussions and work them into the UX. Anyone please send PRs with ideas around how this might work!
diimdeep
Do separate channel with delay to processing HN posts from 8 to 24 hours, and maybe link to first channel in posts.
amy-why
What would you like to see as a summary of the discussions? Sentiment analysis? Summarize each discussion as one sentence? Summarize the overall unique perspectives? Any more ideas?
baxtr
Thought about that idea on twitter comments. I’m not sure if you could monetize that kind of product though.
amy-why
It would be great if hacker news can integrate this feature in the main news so people can read the summary without leaving the page.
wskish
yeah, one of the biggest issues on HN is that folks comment without reading the story article. Perhaps this sort of summary of the story article can help drive a higher quality engagement.
jbkkd
This could be done using a browser extension for desktop which fetches the already summarized text generated for the bot.

Or better yet, rather than costing you server hours, it would authenticate the user with openai directly so each user uses his personal account

UncleEntity
> What other interfaces would make sense here?

RSS feed maybe?

Heard people complain about the lack of goodness in the RSS where it basically just gives you a link to the article so they can get the page views.

_puk
"An MP4 file first draft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33741701 This is a blog post from the Twitter Help Center. It explains that the MP4 file format is not supported by Twitter. It recommends that users switch to a supported browser or enable JavaScript."

Declared with such authority!

wskish
haha yeah thats pretty funny. We need to figure out how to derate these models when the have no actual clue. And also how to scrape the source content even better...
wskish
Here are a few recent ouputs from the service:

Editing Binaries in DOS (2002) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33737207 This is a technical report on editing binaries in DOS. The author describes how to use the debugger program DEBUG.EXE to edit binary files without requiring additional tools. The author provides two examples of how to edit a binary file. The first example edits a string of bytes in an executable file. The second example edits machine instructions to alter the behaviour of the program.

Elon Says He’ll Make His Own Phone If Apple and Google Deplatform Twitter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33750616 This is a news article discussing a potential new phone by Elon Musk. The article discusses the controversy around whether or not Twitter should be banned from Apple and Google's app stores. It also discusses the possibility that Musk may make his own phone if Twitter is banned.

IRS warns taxpayers about new $600 threshold for third-party payment reporting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33750598 This is a news article from CNBC discussing the IRS's new $600 threshold for receiving Form 1099-K for third-party payments. The article explains that the change applies to payments from third-party networks, such as Venmo or PayPal, for transactions such as part-time work, side jobs or selling goods. The article also explains that the IRS is reminding taxpayers that they may receive Form 1099-K for transactions they don't expect, such as reselling Taylor Swift tickets at a profit, for example. The article advises taxpayers that if they receive Form 1099-K for personal transactions, they should contact the issuer for a correction.

bitwize
I will fear AI when it produces consistently funny n-gate style summaries of Hackernews.
password4321
What is the current best option for self-hosted summarization?
obert
with some additional coding on top, smaller models like GPT2 and BERT can produce decent summaries, a few summaries per minute depending on your target quality.
wskish
For anyone interested in seeing summaries without telegram you can now view the summaries for the corresponding front page here:

https://news.jiggy.ai